Author: Joziah Council

People often examine aspects such as the quality of a product or service, its uniqueness, and even its longevity to determine the success a company will have, but that is certainly not what success is limited to. Frequently, people underestimate the value and impact intangible assets have on a company’s standing, such as goodwill and the source from which this goodwill originates, ethics. A company’s ethics and moral standards are often a determinant as to what type of individuals comprise their consumer audience. For this reason, marketers and advertisers input significant effort into maintaining these ethics in the public eye and executives into implementing policies that coincide with the ethical standards.

Advertisement has graduated from the simple days of newspaper ads. Today’s advertisement environment is far more complex and requires much more skill and tactic to master than that of previous decades. In a now digital world, a great deal of advertisement is done online as opposed to just television commercials. Today, it is very seldom one is browsing through a website without being overtaken by advertisement. It is everywhere from your favorite music platforms and fashion sites to your very own social media pages. In fact, social media ads make up a significant part of a company’s advertisement campaigns due to their specialization in targeting specific audiences.

Marketing and promotions is the largest single investment for a record company standing at somewhere between $200,000 and $700,000. Most of the promotion is focused on streaming services such as, Pandora, Souncloud, and Spotify. This is because marketers need to focus their efforts on very specific target audience groups in order to yield the profits they do. This need is reflected in the decline in usage and investments in TV and radio ads, wherein it is much more difficult to focus efforts on a specific audience. Another aspect of marketing and promotion that has been experiencing a decline over the years are newspaper and magazines, but for a different reason. These platforms are declining because users are losing interest due to everything being converted to digital marketing which is more accessible. Despite this decline there are still some musically related magazines that have loyal customers who care enough to read their products monthly. One of the largest of these is Rolling Stone magazine, and even they are looking to sell the magazine because of this decrease in usage and this digital conversion.

Marketing and promotion are essential parts in building awareness of a product for any business. This is especially reflected in recording company’s investments in its artists. The major recording companies typically invest between $200,000-$700,000 annually per artist into promoting their music, their largest single investment. This investment is mainly focused on digital platforms as it allows companies to better target niche markets. These platforms are dominated heavily by streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora, and Soundcloud. Although many other platforms in the music industry have experienced a recent decline in investments and usage for advertising, such as TV and radio, they are not yet obsolete and still make up a significant portion of record company’s advertising investments.